China

The Economist on China

AFTER something of a hiatus, we are back with our weekly round-up of TheEconomist’s China coverage. In addition to the China-related gleanings gathered up here on Analects, we publish a China section each week in our print edition. Our attention sometimes turns to China in other sections of the print edition, and on some of our other blogs too. To help readers find all our China coverage in one place we offer this handy set of links to those pieces.

Dissent

THESE are chilling times for outspoken liberals in China. On May 8th national television broadcast footage that purported to show a 70-year-old journalist, Gao Yu, admitting to a police interrogator that she had harmed the national interest by leaking the contents of a secret document online. On the same day a newspaper in Beijing, Global Times, lashed out at a prominent civil-rights lawyer, Pu Zhiqiang, for crossing a “red line” by attending a small private gathering earlier this month in commemoration of the Tiananmen Square unrest in 1989. Mr Pu is also now in detention, for “provoking trouble”.

South China Sea

A NEW piece posted at Banyan, one of our sister blogs, details the latest tiff to flare up over conflicting claims in the South China Sea. China has installed a costly new oil rig. Vietnam has called for its removal. And America has weighed in.

Bombing in Xinjiang

A violent attack on April 30th at the main railway station in Urumqi, the capital of western China’s Xinjiang region, has left at least three people dead and nearly 80 injured. The authorities have been quick to blame “terrorists” (here, in Chinese), a term that in the context of Xinjiang means only one thing: Muslim extremists from Xinjiang’s ethnic Uighur population who resent Chinese control over the province. President Xi Jinping had been visiting Xinjiang (if he had already left, it was at most a few hours earlier) when an unspecified number of assailants staged their early evening attack just outside the station using knives and explosives.

Philanthropy in China

WHEN Bill Gates and Warren Buffett toured China in 2010 they hoped to encourage China's many newly minted billionaires to take up philanthropy. Local elites gave them the cold shoulder. Despite making vast fortunes in a country suffering from widening income inequality, surprisingly few Chinese fat cats have embraced charitable giving.

That may be about to change. Jack Ma (pictured above), the founder of Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce giant, and Joseph Tsai, a co-founder, announced on April 24th that they have set up charities to be funded by stock options in the firm. This matters not only because Mr Ma is a widely admired entrepreneur.

China and Hollywood

THESE days Hollywood filmmakers visiting China are careful to praise its progress in film or at least to avoid giving offence. They have a huge market to appease, the biggest in the world after America. On Thursday Oliver Stone, a director (pictured), made for a rare exception.

Speaking on a panel at the 4th Beijing International Film Festival, Mr Stone savaged the Chinese film industry for failing to confront the last century of China's history, especially the catastrophes under Mao’s rule. He also discussed his own failed efforts at partnering with China to co-produce films.

“You talk about co-productions, but you really don’t want to face the history of China.

Human rights in China

"THIS absurd judgment cannot hold back the tide of human progress", activist Xu Zhiyong told the Beijing Supreme People's Court on April 11th, as his sentence of four years in jail for "gathering a crowd to disturb public order" was upheld. Mr Xu had been found guilty at a closed-door trial in January but had appealed the verdict.

January's guilty verdict was expected. The quashed appeal is no surprise either. China's courts are controlled by the Communist Party and activists are seldom acquitted.

Environmental protest in China

DEMONSTRATIONS against a petrochemical plant have this week reverberated throughout cities in China’s south-eastern Guangdong province, at times becoming riotous. The unrest began on March 30th, when 1,000 protestors assembled outside government buildings in Maoming, a city in southern China’s industrial heartland. They objected to long-standing plans for a 3.5 billion yuan ($563m) paraxylene (PX) plant, a joint venture between the local government and Sinopec, a state-owned oil and gas company. Paraxylene, a chemical in polyester fabric and plastic bottles, is dangerous if inhaled or absorbed through the skin.

China's graffiti artists

Some thirty years have passed since the award-winning film “Style Wars” was released, bringing to the world’s attention the little-understood graffiti culture of 1980s New York. Now a new documentary hopes to shed light on the even lesser-known world of China’s graffiti artists.

“Spray Paint Beijing”, which had its UK premier on March 28th, follows 16 "graffers" (as the artists are called) across the Chinese capital. With its abundance of concrete walls and construction sites, Beijing should be a tagger’s paradise. But the documentary’s director, Lance Crayon, estimates the community to number only in the dozens.

Chinese society

A SURVEY conducted in recent months in 17 countries for BBC World Service by GlobeScan, a polling company, suggests a few surprising differences in how Chinese and many Westerners view their freedoms. Some of the results of the poll will not surprise anyone who has heard of Edward Snowden: a majority of Americans and Germans feel they are not free from government surveillance or monitoring, and only a third of Americans and Canadians, 38% of Britons and 27% of Germans feel the internet is a safe place to express their opinions.

China's censorship leverage

CHINA has long enjoyed leverage over foreign businesses and governments thanks to the lure of its huge market. This goes back even to the latter days of Mao when there was no market to access, just the portent of one.

Today the Communist Party wields its now formidable leverage in all manner of ways, successfully muting or softening criticism from CEOs and world leaders. Purveyors of content—whether Hollywood studios or internet companies—readily make compromises in order to do business in China.

The Economist on China

IN ADDITION to the China-related gleanings gathered up here on Analects, we publish a China section each week in the print edition of TheEconomist. Our attention sometimes turns to China in other sections of the print edition, and on some of our other blogs too. To help readers find all our China coverage in one place we offer this handy round-up.